Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

2.01.2012

The Films of 2011: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

9/11
is everywhere and nowhere in Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close: it wants desperately to be an Important Movie about 9/11, but it can't see it as anything other than an inciting incident to an otherwise unremarkable melodrama. (This
should be no surprise, coming as the film does from the director of The
Reader, in which the Holocaust was
used as a MacGuffin.) In Extremely
Loud, 9/11 serves as a plot point,
a convenient way of dispensing with little Oskar Schell’s father so
that Oskar can embark on a mission to solve the mystery of a key he finds in
his father’s closet, encounter a whole host of magical non-white people (!),
reunite an estranged married couple (!!), and stumble upon his long-lost
grandfather (!!!). As far
as the film is concerned, 9/11 happened so that an elaborate set of
coincidences and chance encounters could be set into motion, as a consequence
of which husbands reconcile with wives and sons make peace with absent
fathers.

The
more I think about the film, the crueler its tricks seem. Just as Oskar obsessively replays
answering-machine messages left by his father moments before the towers fell
(Oskar pinches his skin over and over again while listening to them), Extremely
Loud repeatedly stages the morning
of September 11th like a primal scene.
But it does so for no other reason than to put our emotions through the
wringer. The wrenching
power of these scenes isn’t any credit to the film; they’re nothing but
triggers, ways of touching off our memories of that
morning and of the feelings of grief and helplessness that followed in its wake. Watching this movie and sobbing is as masochistic an act as
Oskar pinching himself—and if you’re resistant to its manipulation it can feel like he’s reaching through the screen and pinching you, too.

Such are the film’s
ambitions that it’s not even content to deliver standard-grade scenes of
suffering. It also has to stylize
its victims in such a way that they become aestheticized, cool. Oskar works through his grief in the
quirkiest, most ingeniously devised ways (watching him process it in more familiar ways just wouldn’t be edgy
enough). His sensitivities more
subtly honed than those of ordinary kids, the hyper-intelligent Oskar
processes trauma fashionably, as when he makes an elaborate hand-bound
scrapbook of his cross-town adventures that looks like it was designed by the
editors of McSweeney’s, or by one of Wes Anderson’s wunderkinder.
(With his fashionably off-beat tastes, social awkwardness, emotional
volatility, condescending attitude, encyclopedic knowledge of obscure things,
and fetish for trendy-nerdy stuff like old maps and vintage cameras, Oskar is
practically a hipster in training.)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close can’t even stop at plain old sentimentality in its rendering of the
fallout from 9/11—it has to make it precious, too.